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For the past 17 years, William “Bill” Shook ’68 has smiled patiently, even chuckled appreciatively, at suggestions that his profits are in the hole and his business down the drain. He’s heard every possible pun, and even read a few in trade magazine articles about his work. You might say it’s just so much water under the bridge to him.
“When you’re in the sewer business, you’d better have a sense of humor,” says Shook, founder and president of AP/M Permaform, a Johnston, Iowa-based company that offers two patented methods for rebuilding crumbling manholes and other underground utility-line structures without digging.
Shook, who wryly refers to himself as “Professor Manhole” on his web site (www.permaform.net or www.professormanhole.com), says he needed plenty of humor, along with determination and a bit of courage, to make the leap in 1986 from owning an established water and sewer supply business to initiating a service that few people had ever heard of, and even fewer could understand.
“Trenchless technology was in its infancy,” Shook says, explaining that he and his wife, Phyllis, went on a nationwide tour to explain their services to public works officials, private industries, and anyone else who might be interested (and managed to visit quite a few of Shook’s Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers as well).
“We crisscrossed the country in a van,” he says. “We’d just go from motel to motel. We’d hang our clothes in the back of the van and, each night, we’d pull out what we needed for the next day. We were really gypsies.”
As he traveled, Shook says, he learned more about the technology he needed to build his business and a good deal about himself and Phyllis, who gladly embraced the new lifestyle and won many friends and clients along the way with her warm personality.
For Shook, the experience was part of a personal and spiritual transformation that began in the wreckage of his failed first marriage and progressed to a new way of looking at his life and his work.
“The first half of my career, I had the wrong perspective, because money was the only thing that motivated me,” he says.
By the time he took to the road, Shook found himself far more motivated by faith, family, and the idea that he could help communities by meeting some of their most basic needs.
“Every prosperous civilization absolutely has to have a good water supply and a good way to get rid of the wastewater,” he says. “It just doesn’t get any more fundamental than that.”
Shook, who learned most of his business along the way, with the help of some graduate work in engineering at Drake University, now regards himself as mainly an educator, helping contractors and engineers learn how to save time and money with his products and techniques. He still does plenty of traveling, but he’s found time to winter in Florida as well.
And, as he plans to attend his class’s 35th reunion at Lafayette this year, he recalls his years as an economics major, defensive end for the football team, and self-described “hell-raiser,” and wonders what classmates will think of his evolution from high-powered salesman to business owner to, well, “Professor Manhole.”
“The education and exposure I got at Lafayette produced in me the ambition, the drive, and the initiative to do what I’ve done,” he says. “The legacy I inherited from Lafayette is a can-do attitude.”
In those early years, Shook says, he hired his own staff of contractors to rebuild manholes. But as the business grew, he changed his focus to manufacturing the materials needed to install the trenchless manholes and providing technical expertise, training, and certification to “applicators” in a variety of locations. Today, AP/M Permaform has 26 licensed applicators in the United States, five in Europe, and one in Israel, and provides a range of products and services.
Just who has benefited from Shook’s processes?
The city of Charlotte, N.C., for one. D&S Construction, AP/M Permaform’s licensed contractor in Ashland, Va., took only four days to restore a manhole at a busy downtown intersection after a 250-foot pipe burst, saving the city from tearing out a concrete driveway, chopping down an oak tree, and closing two lanes of a four-lane highway.
In Chandler, Ariz., Sunair Contracting, the local Permaform contractor, saved the city $75,000 by repairing a manhole under a six-lane highway.
Shook says that in the firm’s Permaform process, workers assemble segmented steel forms inside an existing manhole and fit them with a plastic liner. They then pour high-strength concrete between the existing structure and the forms, embedding locking anchors on the plastic liner into the concrete and forming a “manhole within a manhole.”
In the firm’s Permacast process, workers pressure-wash the walls of an existing manhole to remove loose material, plug leaks, then lower a device called a SpinCaster into the hole to spray mortar, epoxy, or both, using centrifugal force.
“We reinvested a lot of our profits into research and design,” Shook says. “Almost every year, we’ve introduced something new for our applicators.”